It was the last farmers market of the season in Uptown Westerville and although I’d visited the market every Wednesday afternoon I wasn’t pleased with most of the portraits, or attempted portraits, I’d taken during the three hours it was open for business.

This day I tossed my Lastolite EzyBox in the trunk of the car hoping to find a worthy subject.

As is the tradition at the final market, kids in costumes were awarded Trick-or-Treat candies from vendors, some of whom decorated their booths in Halloween dressings or themselves in costumes indicative of their product.

Such was the cheese maker who dressed in a cow costume to offer candies and cookies to her younger customers.

The crowds are usually much smaller at the end of the season, attendance dropping quickly after the last of the fresh corn and then to a trickle when the final freshly picked apples are gone.

That made it a little easier to pull the bovine out of her booth for a quick photo session.

Shot with the 14-24mm lens to include the market, minus half the vendors who stop coming at the end of the season.

Lit with an Nikon SB-800 shot through the Lastolite EzyBox with camera and strobe set to Nikon Creative Lighting System settings.

Underexposed the background by 2/3rd of a stop. Strobe set to normal output.

The EzyBox is mounted on an extension handle so it is about 40 inches over my head and slightly to the left so the light comes from slightly above .

The higher angle makes the light at her feet and slightly behind her less than it would have been at a lower angle. Less light makes the shadows disappear into the background. The softbox light slightly wrapped around her so the shadows are less pronounced than a straight strobe or a what an umbrella would have provided.

Great thing about the EzyBox is how simple it is to setup and teardown. It fits into a small pouch, even with the extension handle.

I have used it at the end of the small monopod used as a strobe extension but it wasn’t in the car as I thought.

The one thing that made this shoot more enjoyable was the enthusiasm of our subject. I’d shot her a little earlier with my iPhone for a different portrait so she was eager to see what was next in my shooting portfolio.

When I have the time between shoots or before heading home, I enjoy a walk in Uptown Westerville, always with a camera in hand. Sometimes the camera is an iPhone. Sometimes it’s a D300 and a full complement of lenses.

The territory is familiar, usually along alleys, roadways, and sidewalks I’ve traveled before on similar walks. Only the seasons and the weather change.

Several days ago, after a few days of heavy rains and cold nights I traveled along the nearest alley leading toward an Uptown elementary school. The alley is flanked with parking spots for the few businesses fronting the main streets and a scattering of garages for the families who live in the remaining historical district homes.

Although the city requires only certain paint colors and architectural styles for any building renovations there are a few buildings where the owners have chosen a more modern palette for their outbuildings. One of these more colorful buildings bears a blue-gray and dark red color set with white trim.

I stopped to shoot it’s tones in a compositional arrangement of lines and boxes hoping for just enough light to keep digital noise to a minimum on my iPhone.

Nature took that moment to add a new element to the composition, sunlight. The day was dreary with a heavy cloud cover obscuring the sun with only a brief hint of what we all hoped for, a warming shaft of sunlight.

I found it just as I began to shoot the side of this garage. The sun brightened the colors of the building and thrust the shadow of a bare tree across its side adding a three dimensional perspective to what had been nothing more than a photo of the side of a building.

The light not only added contrast and saturation to the photo, it transformed an ordinary  moment into a photo that began to evoke the hope of spring and the warmth it promises.

This photo will not win any awards, will not sell as stock, will not be sold as a gallery print and will not be hanging on a wall in my house.

It simply illustrates that light can transform an ordinary scene into a more graphically interesting moment that begins elicits a response from the viewer.

My grandson Owen congratulated me last night for my photo of one of his favorite plants, the Venus Fly Trap.

He also took the time to make sure I understood how the small bristles on the interior of the plant signal the intrusion of a possible meal and how the longer spikes on the edges of the two leaf sections interlock like finges on his hand to hold the meal tight as it excretes acids to dissolve the prey.

He didn’t once ask me about the lighting. Love my grandson, but, please, ask me about the lighting.

The plant was on a shelf at a local nursery where I have relatively free roaming privileges at any time. The store is preparing for spring sales and the staff is constantly adding new plants and displays.

The Venus Fly Trap plants are very young with each trap about 1/2-inch long. I decided to use my Canon G11 with its easy-to-use closeup capabilities. All I needed was a dark background and enough light to make a nice frame.

I moved the plant to a wooden shelving unit which will later hold ceramic and clay pots. The light, softened by the rainy weather and the translucent plastic sheets covering the roof of the greenhouse, wasn’t bright enough to shoot without an additional light source, or two.

I’m not a lazy person but didn’t want to travel to my car to retrieve a set of remote strobes to add light.

I used the next best thing. The lights are always with me, always charges, always ready to illuminate the way or to be used as a light source.

At the rear of my baseball cap is a Petzl Tikka LED head lamp. It’s been removed from its original strap and laced onto the leather adjusting strap. I’ve used a variety of headlamps and have settled on the Petzls because they are sturdy and used AAA batteries instead of the expensive button batteries. My choice is rechargeable AAA batteries.

At my waist, on my belt is a Pelican M1 LED Flashlight. It uses a single CR123 battery. I use rechargables to save the cost of buying these expensive batteries. The flashlight’s holster has a pouch for a replacement battery. When the rechargeables reach depletion, the light goes out without warning. Normal alkaline of lithium batteries begin to lose power and the light gets weaker. Not with rechargeables.

I placed the stronger Petzl headlamp on the shelf at camera right to rim light the spikes and to shine through the translucent leaf section. The Pelican light was handheld just below and to the left of the plant for rim light on the spikes and to spray fill light on the right hand leaf section.

Both lights were moved slightly for composition and to properly light the each leaf.

The Canon G11 was set to aperture priority, macro autofocus with the focus point moved slightly to left of center, ISO400. The exposure was set one stop under to compensate for the dark background.

The resulting image, although not perfect, shows how small flashlights can provide sufficient lighting to create dynamic photos.

Eds note:

Another photo taken with the Pelican Flashlight is at iPhrog and from my iPhone.

EXIF info for top photo.

New York state-based photographer Paul Duncan has put together a nine-minute video that does a great job of explaining how strobes properly sync with shutters and why 1/250th of a second is the upper limit for most digital single lens reflex cameras. [ More from Paul Duncan ]

I love David Hobby. For all the wrong reasons. Maybe they’re the right reasons. You can’t be sure with love.

I remember my first Strobist assignment for the Orlando Sentinel. A restaurant, well known in the community for not only its food but its decor, had redecorated with new wallpaper. That’s right. A restaurant story about wallpaper.

I don’t remember the significance of the wallpaper other than it must have been exceptionally unique and expensive for it to receive a visit by a Sentinel photographer and reporter. Or, maybe, it was the managing editor’s favorite restaurant and watering hole.

The reason isn’t important. The result of my shoot was.

The restaurant assignment was not only my first Strobist assignment for the paper, it was in the first week of my first newspaper job. A week of firsts.

My favorite strobe at that time was a Honeywell Strobonar nicknamed “potato masher” for the blunt hammer design. I’m not sure which model I used then but am guessing it was a Strobonar 600. I could be wrong about the model number. I still have a Strobonar Pressmaster 610 that used a 510-volt battery. The large battery provided quick recycle times. It also became the device for many practical jokes involving tongues.

I had not yet bought one of the newer Vivitar 283 strobes that were introduced just a few years earlier. I had yet to make my riches as a photojournalist an had settled on the Strobonar. It was brighter, better construction, could light a basketball gym or a football field.

Eager to please, I smooshed the restaurant owner to step into the photo. He expected me to shoot the wall. After all, the story was about his new wallpaper, not him.

It’s a matter of expectations. I expected to get a photo worthy of front page display. He expected to get a photo of the wall. I needed a person. He needed his wallpaper. I had a strobe. He didn’t. My strobe looked dangerous, like a potato masher. A heavy potato masher. He stepped into the frame.

My photo, shot on Ektachrome, wasn’t too well received by the photo chief. It was perfectly exposed. Slide film required that.

A single strobe connected with a two-foot cable to my Nikon F. Off camera by two feet in a dark room. Dark ceiling. No reflectors. No second light source. Little chance of success. Directional light that failed to help tell the story. Strong off camera flash that did little to add to the mood. All it did was throw light on a subject. It was a photo by definition only.

I’d learned my lesson and learned it well. I knew better than to shoot with a single strobe in this situation. My expectation is that the paper, having provided me with a camera and a single strobe, would approve of the image. It didn’t. I had know better and allowed my expectations of success to be changed by the performance of others. I’d changed my expectations when I was given a single flash.

I still couldn’t afford to buy a set of Vivitar 283s. The paper did give me a second strobe, a well-used, less powerful strobe that required tape to hold the batter cover on. The peanut optical slave that came with it was heavily scarred. The connector was loose and needed to be glued.

I never looked back at that failed Strobist image. I saved enough money to buy two Vivitar 283s. I bought a 285 when it first appeared. I made bounce reflectors from cardboard and heavy duty aluminum foil. I scored the cardboard so it would fold to a size that would fit in my gadget bag. I carried mirrors in my company car. Bought extra light stands.

The second person at a shoot or the one who said they didn’t want to be in the photo became my HLS or HRH (human reflector holder.)

Not much has changed since then. Except for David Hobby and digital cameras. David embraced for the masses what newspaper photographers had been doing even before Vivitar 283s and Wein peanut slaves.

His latest post is brief and to the point. Not like this one.

I quote David: “Don’t try to please everyone. The more worried you are about pleasing everyone else, the less likely you are to ever please yourself. Nor are you likely produce anything truly interesting or develop any kind of a personal style worth having.”

I knew that when I walked into the restaurant. I forgot it when I picked up my single strobe. I’ve not forgotten since then.

Click to enlarge in new window

I ingested the photos from the shoot through Photo Mechanic so I could resize and add copyright information before moving it to the phrog.com Web page. Once I saw the image in Photoshop I realized how much better it looked in color especially when I  slightly adjusted the color and tone to darken her hair.

This was the last of eight photos I shot in one minute and 20 seconds. The first two were of her smiling and slightly turned toward the camera. Although she has a great smile, I thought the more stoic expression would work better as a more classic portrait. Moving her to the left side of the frame put her head inside the halo of light falling on the wall just off her shoulder. Her shadow fell across the right side of the frame emphasizing the spot of light.

The light is a PROMASTER SystemPRO Cool Light fluorescent source softened through diffusion material. It was held by a HLS, the other student.

If this had been a formal portrait session I would have been more careful about how her hair falls and would have moved it away from her chin and made sure the hair at right  wasn’t so disheveled.

That being said, not bad for 80 seconds and an iPhone.

First, the client bought me dinner so we could talk about our relationship and discuss his needs for the photo shoot to follow. It was my second free meal of the day with the first being fried catfish and green beans with sweet tea. The evening meal was chicken parmigiana with cheese ravioli and red sauce.

The assignment to follow the last meal was to shoot a set of photos of mixed martial artists for banners to be displayed at the entrance to the event venue and some advertising information before the event in several weeks.

The shoot was set for one of the fighter’s local training gyms where I’d planned to build a small studio with strong rim lighting, a softbox fill light above the camera and a directional light across the background and a spotted hair light to create depth.

The background would be a found location in the gym perhaps lockers, chain fencing for the ring or a wall with graffiti or rough paint.

My plans fell apart within several minutes after my arrival. The gym was packed with fighters training, sparring and occupying almost every square foot of the training space. There was little, if any space to build even a studio, even with my SB800s and lightweight stands.

Another problem I encountered, and somewhat anticipated, the fighters were there to train and wanted little to do with sitting for a protracted shooting session as I worked them into position and attitude for good photography. Most had been photographed before but not by a pro shooter who wanted more of their time than quickly standing with a fighting pose for a quick frame or two of on-camera flash.

As luck would have it, two of the walls in the front training room were lined with red cushioning pads similar to the pads beneath the basket of a middle school gym where I’d photographed a team. I’d used the slightly reflective background before and knew what results I’d get by throwing a strobe on it.

I wasn’t going to be able to set up light stands on the padded floor. I didn’t have a lot of time and the space was occupied with about 12 fighters running through exercises and practicing submission techniques. Their motions took them through the spaces where light stand would have stood. I had to change my plans from four or five lights to one.

Although I’d planned to use a small softbox for the front light in my previous lighting plan, I’d brought along a Lumodi Beauty Dish to substitute if my internal muse disliked the softer light.

The softbox light would have been good for front lighting with strong rim light striking the sides of the fighter’s heads defining their shape and separating them from the background. Using a softbox as a single light source might have worked on some models but not fighters with a days growth of beard, sweat, and attitude.

The Lumodi Beauty Dish, a recent purchase and used just enough to be comfortable with its use, was the perfect choice.

Its light was stronger than the softbox but not as contrasty as a bare strobe. I wanted to create contrast on facial features with a directional light. the beauty dish was a good choice I also had access to a small ring light but sometime think it is overused. The beauty dish was a good choice for this situation.

I used a human light stand to position the beauty dish directly over my head almost as if it was a tall strobe attached to the camera. The fighter’s were places as close to the background as possible so light falloff from the strobe would be minimum.

I used Nikon Creative Lighting System to determine the exposure because I was constantly changing my position to the subject for to shoot a full length to a tighter head shot. The light, attached to a HLS, was always being moved closer or further from the subject. Shooting ion manual with a single f-stop and constant strobe output would have slowed the process. I would have to stop between each setup and adjust either my f-stop or the output of the strobe to compensate for its changed position.

The beauty dish created just enough directional lighting to highlight each fighter’s facial features and a shadow that was soft enough to keep some detail to help create depth.

The camera was set to manual exposure, 1/320th, f5.6, RAW.

I worked through 7 fighters in 14 minutes with individual poses and several poses facing another fighter.

Post processing included multiple layers of RAW image smart object processing and masking, increased clarity with the Topaz 4 Photoshop plug-in, and High Pass filter for sharpening with masking so it only applied to certain portions of the fighter’s face.

The toughest time of the day for me is during the school year when I’m the one taking kids to school in the morning.

There’s nothing more frustrating than sitting in morning traffic as the sun creeps over the tree line to my left throwing shadows across the road in front of me. I watch, as best I can while traveling in morning drive-time traffic with kids in the car, knowing that by the time I return to that same spot after dropping of the kids that it will have changed. The light will be higher in the sky. The dew will have evaporated. The orange glow from sunlight traveling through the low atmosphere will cool off. The dark western skyline will become bright.

I will have missed the moment.

I know of a photographer whose friends and family think him to be a little eccentric. He’s up well before dawn each day, traveling to the nearest point of interest for early light photos. Even on vacation, traveling, Sunday, he adheres to the personal rule of getting up before the sun and watching as it moves higher in the sky.

He then retreats to home, or hotel, where during the mid-day, while most people are caught in worrying about what’s for lunch and who to have lunch with, he’s asleep, napping long enough to catch up on the missed sleep of early morning.

When everyone else is settling into completing their work day, he’s off again the watch as the day’s sun slips below the horizon and the last slashes of light travel across his path. His day is then nearly complete with only editing chores ahead.

What makes this story important is that this photographer makes his living shooting in the morning and the afternoon. Only several hours a day make his work week. How many people can say that watching the sun rise and fall are their daily work objectives. It certainly would be nice.

For the rest of us, those of us who shoot in the other hours of daylight, we must watch the light to make sure it helps tell the story of what we are seeing.

A kid running through a field of dandelion seed globes wouldn’t be nearly as effective it wasn’t backlit. Watch your light. See if it adds to the impact of your photo. The angle and intensity of the light source may be a distraction or confuse the viewer by highlighting distracting elements in the frame.

One of the main differences between a good photographer and someone who takes snapshots is an understanding of light and how critical it is to communicating the impact of an image. Learn to understand the revealing properties of light and the rest can become exceptionally easy. Forget about light and its importance and the rest has no meaning.

The second photo I shot for the editorial assignment mentioned two days ago was of an engineer demonstrating how a portion of the temperature sensor systems were manufactured. It was a perfect complementary image to the closeup of tweezers grasping on of the minuscule temperature sensors.

The lighting is similar. One light, an SB800, is placed at right slightly behind the apparatus. This strobe will rim light it and put a strong light on the engineer’s face. A second SB800 at far left and slightly behind the engineer make a hair light to separate him from the background and to cross light the apparatus.

The third light, a Vivitar 283, was set 180 degrees of the angle of the strobe at right creating a slight cross light where they struck the same object. The strobe at right was just a little higher.

Posing the engineer so only one eye peeked around the apparatus created an unusual composition that balanced out the size and shape of the numbered rotor he’s attaching wires to. The symmetry of his hands frames the horizontal edges of the photo keeping your eye at the center.

I failed to flag the strobe at right so more light than I wanted fell on the background at top right.

This was one of two photos I could set up and light within the short period of time I had between arriving and the lunch plans of the office. Not unusual for a news photo assignment time.

Today’s post is number 100. Hopefully they’ve been enjoyable for you.

It’s been an experience for me as I return to a part of what began my career many years ago. It’s been quite some time since I wrote a weekly newspaper column about photography. One day I’ll have to go into the fading print archives and see how relevant those articles are to today’s more rapidly moving news and information age.

I’m suspicious that if you substitute Microdol-X and Dektol for Lightroom and Photoshop, ASA for ISO, grain for noise and pneumatic tube for FTP, things haven’t changed all that much.

The techniques and processes may have changed. Yet, still, a good photo from 50 years ago is still a good photo today.

The quality and direction of light hasn’t changed. Pleasing composition is still an absolute. Precise timing is still required.

What continues to be most important is to choose your photos so they teach us a little bit about today, about ourselves and about who we are as observers.